- I know I'm a wee bit nutters, but looking at pics of clouds like this one, just makes me happy: http://bit.ly/nU0koC #
- RT @studentactivism: "My Body, My Choice." A few months ago I was out at a fancy ice cream place with my 8-year-old… http://bit.ly/ob0K0E #
- There's nothing quite like a new leg valve to get the morning off to a great start #mycyborglife #
- My 3-taco lunch at Taco Mesa @ Taco Mesa http://instagr.am/p/IG3E9/ #
- Having my last little dinner party with friends in the old place tonite, before it's all boxes. #bittersweet #Janastartsover #
- Theroux's book seduced me last night (I love it when that happens): http://bit.ly/pon0Uj #
- RT @NewYorker: What’s So Infuriating About Miranda July? http://nyr.kr/r9NSVs #
- Staring the countdown until I move (i.e. my car is full of packing boxes). Ten days to go… #Janastartsover #
- MT @publichistorian: Must-read future-of-media piece that one-ups Franzen & glorifies FB http://tinyurl.com/65bykb3 #
- RT @anselm: what does it mean to live in an age of great sunsets but no stars? #
- Grateful for friends who continue to support, encourage, and inspire me (especially with so much change on the horizon). #awwww #
- New domain name, new server, new project. #soexciting #yesiamageek #
- Another way that I learned to love potatoes while I was in Europe (in addition to Belgian frites): http://bit.ly/rulR0e #JanatakesEurope #
- Is there anything better than fresh peach cobbler on a summer evening? #
- A week ago, I was wandering along the canals of Bruges: http://bit.ly/pzBI3J & http://bit.ly/nA9jg6 #JanatakesEurope #
- Is there anything better than a fresh peach smoothie on a summer afternoon? #
- Tonite was my fastest-ever Friday night commute home from work. #Carmageddon fail? #
- RT @patrick_mj: I'm going to create G+ circles for "young", "restless", "bold", and "beautiful". And, "Uses Oxford Commas" #
- My daughter was featured as one of the "Potterheads" by the local media: http://bit.ly/p9oYcQ #
- MT @westcenter @sunsetmag: Epic Western road trips http://t.co/dqMbItE // loved seeing how many of these I've done this year! #bringit2011 #
- A week ago, I was in Leuven, watching this guy strike the hour on the town square: http://bit.ly/oRvynG #JanatakesEurope #
- A friend took some pics of my family yesterday w/ old-school cameras. Don't think my kids had ever seen a roll of film before. #
Author: Jana
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Twitter Weekly Digest for @janaremy, 2011-07-22
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social media & me
I’m game to try nearly any new form of social media. I’m Instagramming, Flickr-ing, Google+ing, Gowalla-ing and Color-ing, in addition to the ‘traditional’ forms of Twitter, GoogleReader, Facebook and WordPress. A few things I’ve tried and rejected–I didn’t care much for Tumblr, for example. Or Foursquare. And I rarely consult Goodreads or LinkedIn, although I maintain active accounts in both spaces. My favorite spots tend to morph over time, too. At first I rarely Facebooked, but now it’s my primary go-to space because most of my close friends are such avid users and I want to keep abreast of their lives. Same for Twitter. But there are some people who are important to me who don’t use social media very often (or not at all). To keep in touch with them I use Gmail, IM, Skype, and/or texting. But it’s a lot to keep track of these various ways of communicating. And, with differing levels of privacy, I find that I ‘behave’ differently in the various spaces depending on how open they are.
Though for several months my favorite platform has been Twitter, I find that I rarely ‘follow’ the Twitter feed anymore. It’s sort of gone the way of my RSS blogfeeds–something to dip into only if I have some time to kill, and I’m never caught up. Recently I also removed a lots feeds and ‘follows’ from my lists because either I found them uninteresting or I simply never got around to reading their content. In addition to paring down my lists, I’m also finding myself far more reticent to share as frequently anymore–it’s wearying to have the world know so much about me, and I don’t want to do things simply for the sake of tweeting that I’ve done them.
And, more than that, I’ve found that one of the primary losses from my life with all of the social media whirling around me, is that I’ve lost time for books (and for poetry). So earlier today when I was walking the library stacks to retrieve some research-related tomes, I discovered some other interesting-looking books nearby. Books that I wanted to make sure to add to my nightstand. So I grabbed those, too. Sure, I have too much going on right now to be reading a lot. But at the same time, I don’t want to be the kind of person who isn’t always reading something. And I never want to be that person who can’t pull themselves away from their smartphone long enough to read a chapter (or two!) of a good novel each day.What about you, what are your favorite social media sites? And how do you work to keep your “in real life” experiences in balance with your online ones?
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Travelers…
“Tourists don’t know where they’ve been…Travelers don’t know where they’re going.”
~Paul Theroux, The Happy Isles of Oceania
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holding it in…
After a few attempts to get up the rock wall last night, my climbing partner observed that I seemed unusually stressed. She suggested that I just hang out for a bit and talk before I got back on the wall. When she pointed that out, I realized just how wound up my body was–I was talking a bit too fast, holding my shoulders tight, creasing that space between my eyebrows…I wasn’t climbing particularly well, either–I was too tense to stretch and reach and feel confident.
There are days when things tend to cluster in my life (and in my mind), and worry overtakes me for awhile–even when it’s sort of simmering beneath the surface and I don’t realize it. The various things that are concerning me right now: moving, job, research, health, kids…they are impacting me far more than I’d like to admit. My back muscles are taut, my throat feels sore, my food isn’t digesting well, and I’m wishing away some of my responsibilities.
I know this will pass and tomorrow or the next day I’ll feel relaxed and lighthearted again. But some days…are just harder than others.
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to travel well…
It is better to travel well than to arrive.
~BuddhaThis time around, my traveling took on a new pattern. Instead of making a long list of ‘must-see’ places, I carried some guidebooks and maps around (on my iPad–so convenient), and let serendipity guide much of my wanderings. The second and third days in Provence I had no reservations and no firm plan except that I had a vague notion of wanting to see St. Remy-de-Provence because of being a Remy myself. And while that town was utterly charming, it was more crowded and less fun than the other parts of Provence that I visited. Some things I learned from this experience:
-local Visitor’s Bureaus are invaluable resources for finding lodging at the last minute
-much of Provence is not in guidebooks and can’t be found through a Google search
-the locals were eager to make suggestions for excellent eating, and they were more than willing to go out of their way to make sure that we didn’t get lost in our search for food and lodging
-though at times the roundabouts were confusing, most every road was well signposted for finding one’s way
-when you get up one morning with the intention of ‘driving to the next village’ for coffee and you just start driving in whatever random direction seems interesting, it might be a very long time before you find coffee. But when you do, it will be at the perfect little family-run cafe with pain chocolate and a hot dark brew.
More than anything, I learned to release my need to know everything ahead of time. I let myself just be where I was, even if that included being a wee bit hungry when a restaurant wasn’t just around the corner. I not only found beautiful medieval towns, waterways, rock formations, and tasty olives-wine-lavender-cheese, but I also found huge comfort in learning to do things a new way, and to even enjoyed it more than how I’ve traveled in the past.
I used to be far more afraid of an uncertain future. But I’m not (so much) now…
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unthinkably good things can happen…
On the last day of my trip when I was feeling blue about having to return home, a ladybug landed on my arm. I held it in my hands for a bit, remembering all of the times that my kids and I had held critters and talked about them (we would sit for hours in the garden and experience whatever came our way, but ladybugs were always an especially fun find, part of why I’ve sometimes called Catgirl ‘ladybug’). A few times we even bought ladybugs and released them into our garden to eat the aphids on our roses.
Perhaps what I was thinking of most as that little critter crawled up and down my arm, was simply how random and beautiful life is. So many twists and turns have brought me to where I am now–some the result of long-sown seeds of intention and some the result of complete serendipity. But it seems that the most important thing is to continue to marvel at what life brings and to slow down a bit on those days that ladybugs (and butterflies and new friends) find me…Yes, it’s a bit cliche to say it that way, but sometimes when life gives you a cliche, you’ve got to embrace that, too :)
(Sort of like this clip from “Under the Tuscan Sun”….):
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burning
Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
~Douglas Adams
Over and over again during my travels I found myself drawn into churches (this behavior undoubtedly abetted by the fact that France and Belgium are chock-full of churches). I love the cool quiet spaces of sanctuaries–for meditation and for observation.While at one famous church in Paris, I lit a candle for a friend and said a prayer for her. Paying 2 euros for the candle before lighting and setting it on the stand felt a bit…cheap to me. I didn’t want to think about money, only about my friend. I suppose that’s why I tend to feel so conflicted about religion–somehow the practicalities of the organizations (money, structure, authority) tend to bog down what’s most beautiful about the devotion of the adherents. Yet, as frustrated as I am with religion, I give homage to the beautiful spaces that are the remnants of such faith–the church structures that delight and lift my thoughts a bit higher.
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Roll through my chant…
Thee in thy panoply, thy measured dual throbbing, and thy beat convulsive;
Thy black cylindric body, golden brass, and silvery steel;
Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides;
Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar—now tapering in the distance;
Thy great protruding head-light, fix’d in front;
Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple;
The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack;
Thy knitted frame—thy springs and valves—the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels;
Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily-following,
Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering:
Type of the modern! emblem of motion and power! pulse of the continent!
For once, come serve the Muse, and merge in verse, even as here I see thee[…]Fierce-throated beauty!
Roll through my chant, with all thy lawless music! thy swinging lamps at night;
Thy piercing, madly-whistled laughter! thy echoes, rumbling like an earthquake, rousing
all!
~from Walt Whitman, “To a Locomotive in Winter”
One of the best parts of my trip was that I traveled (and traveled and traveled) by train. I took high-speed trains from Brussels to Avignon, from there to Paris, and also to London and back. I’ve said before that I try to make sure that every single journey I take includes a ride on a train, and this one certainly didn’t disappoint! Some of my train trips even included spontaneous cheese-bread-waffle picnics like this one:
(And because I fear that I’ve spoken far too much about my wine-bibbing on this trip already on my blog, the beverage in my glass will remain unmentioned…but were I to mention it, I might note just how strange it felt to be allowed to drink such stuff on public transport…)And…as a further indulgence for my train fetish, I also had the opportunity to visit and photograph a few antique cars near an old railway-station-turned-coffeehouse. I’m rather embarrassed to admit just how much I enjoyed that part of my adventure…
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Twitter Weekly Digest for @janaremy, 2011-07-15
- Everything just became a bit brighter–my kids are home! #happyhappyhappy #
- Making some big decisions this morning. Hard, but necessary. And feeling thankful for friends who are helping me see clearly… #
- My first carnitas burrito at Freebirds http://lockerz.com/s/119558155 #
- My @tacoasylum taco has tentacles http://lockerz.com/s/119356391 #
- Realizing just how beautiful, intense & bittersweet life can be. Words fail… #
- Forgot about cheese knife in my purse, but it was found by airport security. Ugh. Big mistake. #JanatakesEurope #
- Listening to the bells of Brugges #JanatakesEurope #
- On the Antwerp plaza with @ellendecoo and some fine Trappist brew :) http://lockerz.com/s/118249570 #
- An overcast afternoon in Leuven, sipping coffee at a terasse cafe while listening to a local musical festival #JanatakesEurope #
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in vino…
Within days of realizing that I was getting divorced, I bought a case of Lazy Bones wine. It was a bit of an impulse buy on special from Trader Joe’s, which caught my eye simply because I loved the label (& fortunately the wine isn’t too bad, either). The woman lounging on the front of the bottle is curvily-nude and seems so incredibly comfortable in her skin (“Why mix with others when being myself is so beautiful?”). And she has a cat, too!
I didn’t drink all of this wine myself, I’ve handed it out to various friends who’ve been in need of a bottle along the way. And now I’m on the last two bottles of Lazy Bones and it seems worth marking that, and looking forward. I’ve moved past the phase where I need the affirmation of the lazy lady. And I wonder what will capture my attention next?
Any suggestions?
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love is everything…
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At night…
One of my favorite aspects of being in Provence was walking around the old cities late at night, when lanterns threw such charming shadows on the old buildings. Typically, I was more than a little warmed by local wine as we wandered up and around cobblestone streets, which certainly added a bit of magic to the experience.
This photo is a bit blurrier than most I snapped on those long walks, but I love how it captures the washed-out romance of the night. Now, if only I could add the loud hum of cicadas and the smell of water splashing in corner fountains and the sight of a few kitties peering down at me from red tile rooftops and an orange crescent moon growing larger every night that I was there. And maybe you can imagine me taking it all in, wide-eyed and smiling, hardly believing that I wasn’t simply dreaming such beauty.
